Business expense reimbursement is loathed by business travelers, employees, and anyone else that has to complete a reimbursement form. This is especially true for frequent travelers who may accumulate hundreds to thousands of individual reimbursable items every year for such things as flights, trains, subways, car services, rental cars, parking, hotels, meals, drinks, phone usage, entertainment, etc. Current known systems typically require that each expense item be manually entered into a form, which then gets submitted for approval, and hopefully, results in reimbursement. To complicate matters, companies oftentimes require employees or contractors to submit expenses within a certain time period, such as two weeks or a month from when the expenses were incurred. It has become quite common for an employee (or an administrative assistant) to spend a significant portion of a workday or significant portion of an evening or weekend completing an expense reimbursement form. To make matters worse, as employers attempt to cut costs, many expense reimbursement forms are returned to the submitters for items that do not conform to company policies or are otherwise unclear.
Some known systems attempt to address the above issues by providing an application that uses a camera on a smartphone to record pictures of business receipts. These known systems use optical character recognition technology to read the receipts and fill in the appropriate fields in the reimbursement forms. While these systems work with varying degrees of success, it is required that the user obtain and save a paper (or electronic) copy of a receipt. Frequent travelers oftentimes lose or misplace paper receipts. In other instances, receipts are not even provided. As a result, business travelers and other employees are left to manually enter items into the expense reimbursement form.
Other known systems are linked to a credit card of the traveler. These systems are managed by the employer and usually require that the credit card be issued though the employer as a company business card. Even if the credit card is not issued through the company, these systems are configured to pull, import, or otherwise obtain all of the transactions for that credit card. In other words, through this known expense reimbursement system, the employer has access to all transactions for the linked credit card. This visibility to the employer may not be an issue some of the time. However, some business travelers and other employees/contractors may wish to keep their employers from seeing some transactions that will never be submitted for reimbursement (e.g., a souvenir for a spouse or children, a hotel pay-per-view movie, a client outing to an exotic club, bottle service at a bar, intentional or accidental uses of the credit card for personal reasons, etc.). In some cases, an employer may view the transactions (even the ones that are not submitted) and use the content of the transactions as a basis for firing or otherwise discriminating or disciplining the employee.
These known systems usually require that all of the received transactions are submitted for reimbursement. The systems may even send weekly or monthly reminders until every transaction has been submitted or promote the un-submitted transactions to a supervisor. As mentioned, some transactions are not within the guidelines for expense reimbursement and will never be submitted, which means they have to linger in the system or be manually removed by someone with administrative privileges. Other transactions may be business related for a client but the employee may not want to submit the transactions for reimbursement to prevent from being tacky and billing the client for the expense.